Attos' Magazine

Volume #79, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Hail of Stones

Following the red dust, a “small dust,” like “ashes of the furnace,” fell “in all the land of Egypt” (Exodus 9 : 8), and then a shower of meteorites flew toward the earth. Our planet entered deeper into the tail of the comet. The dust was a forerunner of the gravel. There fell “a very grievous hail, such as has not been in Egypt since its foundations” (Exodus 9 : 18). Stones of “barad,” here translated “hail,” is, as in most places where mentioned in the Scriptures, the term for meteorites. We are also informed by Midrashic and Talmudic sources that the stones which fell on Egypt were hot; this fits only meteorites, not a hail of ice. In the Scriptures it is said that these stones fell “mingled with fire” (Exodus 9 : 24), the meaning of which I shall discuss in the following section, and that their fall was accompanied by “loud noises” (kolot), rendered as “thunderings,” a translation which is only figurative, and not literally correct, because the word for “thunder” is raam, which is not used here. The fall of meteorites is accompanied by crashes or explosion-like noises, and in this case they were so “mighty,” that, according to the Scriptural narrative, the people in the palace were terrified as much by the din of the falling stones as by the destruction they caused (Exodus 9:28).

The red dust had frightened the people, and a warning to keep men and cattle under shelter had been issued: “Gather thy cattle and all that thou hast in the field; for upon every man and beast which shall be found in the field, and shall not be brought home, the hailstories shall come down upon them, and they shall die” (Exodus 9: 19). “And he that regarded not the word of the Lord left his servants and his cattle in the field” (Exodus 9 : 21).

Similarly, the Egyptian eyewitness: “Cattle are left to stray, and there is none to gather them together. Each man fetches for himself those that are branded with his name.” Falling stones and fire made the frightened cattle flee.

Ipuwer also wrote: “Trees are destroyed,”“No fruits, no herbs are found,”“Grain has perished on every side,”“That has perished which yesterday was seen. The land is left to its weariness like the cutting of flax.” In one day fields were turned to wasteland. In the Book of Exodus (9 : 25) it is written: “And the hail [stones of barad] smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field.”

The description of such a catastrophe is found in the VisuddhiMagga, a Buddhist text on the world cycles. “When a world cycle is destroyed by wind . . . there arises in the beginning a cycle-destroying great cloud. . . . There arises a wind to destroy the world cycle, and first it raises a fine dust, and then coarse dust, and then fine sand, and then coarse sand, and then grit, stones, up to boulders as large . . . as mighty trees on the hill tops.” The wind “turns the ground upside down,” large areas “crack and are thrown upwards,”“all the mansions on earth” are destroyed in a catastrophe when “worlds clash with worlds.”

The Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan describe how a cosmic catastrophe was accompanied by a hail of stones; in the oral tradition of the Indians, too, the motif is repeated time and again: In some ancient epoch the sky “rained, not water, but fire and red-hot stones,” which is not different from the Hebrew tradition.

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